Man to receive £70k refund in CIL planning charge row

[Temp]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y2p0kn5zko.amp

 

Quote:

 

A man who was charged £70,000 by his local council for making "a small home improvement" is to get a refund.

 

Steve Dally had been granted planning permission to replace an existing house extension that was exempt from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), but he did not realise an extra application to make minor amendments was subject to the charge.

 

 

[nod]

It just shows that they can do what they want Or think they can

[ToughButterCup]

And someone forgot to test the seals at the temperatures that were to be expected on the 1980s rocket launch  (Challenger  1980s ?) On that cock-up, people died.

Whatever the discipline, thinking systems through properly takes talented people lots of time to get things right.

And everyone makes mistakes.

 

Its just that some  fooketyfookups are more visible than others.  And its great fun kicking Local Authorities. Newsworthy. 

Try underfunding your business to the extent that LAs have been over the last decade or more - and then see how many wheels fall off your wagon.

[AliG]

They are well enough funded, they just have no idea how to spend money.

 

Recently I have seen Edinburgh Council budget £60,000 to change a pavement from grass to tarmac. The pavement is roughly 60m x1m so 60sq metres. There is already kerb, they just want to make it a hard surface. I think I paid around £8,000 for something similar when I built my house. Generally tarmac costs around £100 a square metre. I can accept that councils have overheads but this is ridiculous.

 

They have also budgeted £100,000 to redesign a junction. Not for the build work, just the design. The local community council spent less than £2,000 to investigate and provide possible new designs. You could employ someone full time to do every design needed in the town for similar money.

 

They also want to spend £35m to pedestrianise a street in the centre of the town, luckily they don't have any money for this.

 

Then the piece de resistance. £1bn for the new Barlinnie Prison, with space for 1344 prisoners. So £744,000 per prisoner. More than the build cost on a 5 bedroom house. For comparison Premier Inn budgets around £55,000 per room to build a hotel. Clearly a prison should cost more, but not 15x more. Just for a sense check they are currently building two new large prisons in America. Alabama is spending $1.1bn for over 4000 prisoners and $1.2bn for 4200, so less than one third the per person cost of Scotland's new prison.

 

These are small examples which when you add them all together gets you into the position we are in with HS2. People will talk about government overstaffing, but I think the real problem is that they have no idea of how to price things.

 

No one party is to blame as all these things have been ordered up by every party. There just seems no sense check on money being spent.

[ToughButterCup]

15 hours ago, AliG said:

They are well enough funded, ...

 

And how long does the average applicant take to obtain Planning Permission? 

[SteamyTea]

22 hours ago, ToughButterCup said:

And someone forgot to test the seals at the temperatures that were to be expected on the 1980s rocket launch  (Challenger  1980s ?) On that cock-up, people died

Not what happened. The seal manufactures told NASA not to launch, but they still did.

It was a failing of senior management that felt under pressure to deliver.

 

Feynman at his finest.

 

 

 

 

Edited 11 hours ago by SteamyTea

[jack]

On 03/07/2025 at 09:31, Temp said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y2p0kn5zko.amp

 

Quote:

 

A man who was charged £70,000 by his local council for making "a small home improvement" is to get a refund.

 

Steve Dally had been granted planning permission to replace an existing house extension that was exempt from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), but he did not realise an extra application to make minor amendments was subject to the charge.

 

The last two or three issues of Private Eye have briefly addressed local council abuses of the CIL system, and this person's plight with Waverley council in particular. I don't know much about CIL (it didn't apply when I built), but I'm aware that there are huge potential financial traps for the unwary.

 

Perhaps we should add a sticky post with a warning in the relevant sub-forum.

[ProDave]

It makes me angry that the law says the CIL won't apply to self builders.  So WHY are they allowed to make the system so complicated and with so many "traps" to try and make self builders pay if they don't tick the right boxes in the right order?

[Alan Ambrose]

It's a moral failing. Someone at the council thought 'should we try and hoodwink £70K out of a council-tax-paying 'customer' for making a paperwork mistake?'.

 

And the answer came back: 'yes, let's try it on'.

 

And yes, Feynman was a legend.

[jack]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

It makes me angry that the law says the CIL won't apply to self builders.  So WHY are they allowed to make the system so complicated and with so many "traps" to try and make self builders pay if they don't tick the right boxes in the right order?

 

At a guess, some combination of incompetence, malice, disengagement, and self-interest on behalf of the council and its employees.

 

Whatever the cause, the outcome has in many cases been deeply unfair. I can't see any reasonable basis for the requirement that every CIL box be ticked before you can even trim a hedge or lay some hardcore, for example. If the law is meant to be that self-builders don't pay, then the law's intention shouldn't be subvertable by councils requiring that a set of narrow formal requirements must all be met before an early, arbitrary, and unextendible deadline.

 

It reminds me a lot of how the VAT self-build refund was operating for a while. The clear intention of the law is for self-builders to be able to recover VAT, but HMRC did everything in its power to subvert that intention by using a definition of "complete" that was completely at odds with any reasonable meaning of the word, and was certainly contrary to how it was used in the legislation.